Society of Architectural Historians Announces the 2023 H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellows

Download the Press Release (PDF)

The Society of Architectural Historians has named Jasper Ludewig and Annie Schentag as the recipients of the 2023 H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. The fellowship enables emerging professionals to study by travel and contemplation with the goals of experiencing the built environment firsthand, thinking about their profession deeply, and acquiring knowledge useful to their future work and contributions to their field and society.

Architectural historian Jasper Ludewig is a lecturer in the School of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Newcastle in Australia. He earned his PhD from the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney in 2020 and his Bachelor of Design in architecture from the University of Sydney in 2012. He currently serves as associate editor of Architectural Theory Review.

Through the fellowship, Dr. Ludewig hopes to gain insight into the landscapes, structures and processes implicated in the history of resource subimperialism throughout the nineteenth-century South Pacific. He will focus on the period between 1880 and 1919 when British, German, Anglo-German and Anglo-French consortia extracted rock phosphate from hundreds of islands for use as an industrial fertilizer. Over the course of six months, he will travel to Australia, Germany, New Zealand, Nauru, Banaba, Christmas Island, and Palau to visit former workings and residual infrastructures of the British Phosphate Commission and German South Sea Company, former chemical processing facilities, and agricultural regions (sites of historical phosphate application). He will begin his travel in July 2023.

“The H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship will allow me to visit the islands, mines and landscapes involved in the historical circulation of rock phosphate from the Pacific into Europe and Australasia. In this, the fellowship enables me to connect my archival research into resource subimperialism with firsthand experience of the remote and disparate places it considers—an entirely unfeasible undertaking without the support provided by SAH,” said Ludewig. “I am very grateful to the Society for this unique opportunity and look forward to sharing my travels on the SAH Blog later in the year.”

Annie Schentag is a partner at KTA Preservation Specialists, a historic preservation firm based in Buffalo, NY. She also teaches as an adjunct instructor at SUNY at Buffalo and Villa Maria College. She earned her PhD in the history of architecture and urbanism from Cornell University in 2017, her Master of Urban Planning from SUNY at Buffalo in 2011, and her BA in art history from Smith College in 2007.

During her fellowship, Dr. Schentag plans to visit Panama, Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina and Uruguay, countries that are currently reframing their interpretations of the historic built environment through preservation, planning and heritage practices. Her three-month itinerary is designed to examine the intersection of preservation practices and urban reinvention in a transnational context, where she will view sites through the multiple lenses of architectural history, historic preservation, urban planning, and art history. Dr. Schentag will explore examples of locally designed modern and contemporary architecture in balance with their colonial and Indigenous manifestations. Through her travels she hopes to develop a deeper understanding of the power and privilege entrusted in the task of preserving histories for a variety of marginalized communities. She will begin her fellowship in May 2023.

“I am honored and thrilled to visit five countries never before visited on the Brooks Fellowship, which begins to adjust a canonically disproportionate emphasis on European examples that my students often encounter in their coursework,” said Schentag. “Now more than ever, scholarship has a lot to learn from the ‘other’ America. I hope that traveling on this itinerary can be an education in all these intertwined fields—historic preservation, urban planning, and art history—mixed with a strong dose of humanity and humility.”

Ludewig and Schentag will document their fellowship journeys through monthly posts on the SAH Blog that will include written narratives, photographs, video, drawings, and other media. For more information on the H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship, visit sah.org/brooks.